The volumes in the series comprise collected contributions on subjects that are the focus of discourse in terms of art theory, cultural studies, art history, and research at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and form the quintessence of international study and discussion taking place in the respective fields. Each volume is published in the form of an anthology edited by staff members of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Authors of high international repute are invited to write contributions dealing with the respective areas of emphasis. Research activities such as international conferences, lecture series, institute-specific research focuses, or research projects serve as the points of departure for the individual volumes.

The publication series is edited by the Rectorate of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Aesthetic Politics in Fashion outlines critical studies in the present cross-sections of fashion, art, politics, and global capitalism. Critically examining contemporary collaborations of artists, media, and fashion labels, this groundbreaking anthology locates fashion within ecological and ethical discourses, postcolonial styles, and critical reflections on whiteness. Contributions from a distinguished group of international scholars debate fashion as a cultural phenomenon at the intersection of artistic, creative, economic, and everyday practices.

Aesthetic economies, the production of space, and alternative aesthetic politics are explored from interdisciplinary angles: art history, cultural science, sociology, design, and fashion studies. Aesthetic Politics in Fashion advances theorizing of fashion as an aesthetic metapolitics.

Performing the Sentence brings into dialogue the ways that "performative thinking" has developed in different national and institutional contexts, within different disciplines in the arts, and the conditions under which it has devel- oped in experimental art schools. The anthology collects 21 essays and conver- sations that weave in and out of the two key areas of research and teaching within performative fine art. They bring to light the conventions involved in the production, presentation, reception and historicization of performance art, as well as the specific cultural and political implications. The various contributions also show how these conventions are produced through or within each artwork, independent from their specific contexts, offering ways of thinking beyond their usual frames of reference. At the same time they recognize the substantial work carried out by artists, critics, and theorists who have built the meanings, references, and implications since the beginning of the "performative turn."

Transcultural Modernisms is based on the findings of an interdisciplinary research project with focus on modernist architectural projects realized in the era of decolonization. It maps out the network of encounters, transnational influences, and local appropriations of an architectural modernity manifested in various ways in housing projects in India, Israel, Morocco, and China that served as exemplary standard models, not only for Western societies. The emphasis in Transcultural Modernisms is on the exchanges and interrelations among international and local actors and concepts, a perspective in which "modernity" is not passively received, but is a concept in circulation, moving in several different directions at once, subject to constant renegotiation and reinterpretation. Modernism is not presented as a universalist and/or European project, but as marked by cultural transfers and their global localization and translation.

In the last two decades there has been a significant boom in the cultural sensibility towards sounds and noise - a kind of sonic boom that can, following the second meaning of this term, be seen as a breakthrough of the sonic itself. In the wake of this phenomenon, the relationship between Fine Arts and sound as a material of production on the one hand, and the field of Sound Art which emerged since the 60s on the other hand was recalibrated. Questions surrounding issues of spatiality in the Fine Arts that gained in importance with the surge of intermedia installations were increasingly posed on the basis of experimental sound. Pop music has recognised its specific relation to the materiality of sound as its primary source and positioned it at the core of self-reflective projects. Through the ubiquity of individual and ever-present sonic markers such as mobile phone jingles and sound installations in public space, everyday life has become the scene of a continuous sonic semiosis.

This essay is an attempt to conceive a necessary step to be made by an emacipated "second generation" diaspora on its way to independence, no longer bound to the post-colonial and therefore not locality defined. The "second generation" was able to create its own self-definition, rooted within media and independent content, and thus emancipated itself from geographical and racist or sexist definitions; it is now no longer possible to keep on relating to theoretical roots within presenting a contemorary perspective or outlook.

Post-colonialism is like a religious bind that can lo longer hold against long-needed reforms. By trying to analyse and document the phenomenon of a "second generation" that places itself and its cultural productions and language within the liquid form of media, it is possible to break this bind built on geographical heritage and ethnic parameters.

While so-called new capitalist global exhibition projects that either include selected Third and Second World artists and their artworks or are organized just for them are developing, so is a subtle system of inclusion and exclusion. These projects demonstrate some important new directions that can be seen not only as conceptual shifts but also as technological ones. Key here is the technique of transfer that provides the means of reproduction. The center (the capitalist First World) establishes hegemonic interpretations of the other worlds. We can detect a dialectical process between the technology of writing and the politics of plublishing. Theory and the industry of theoretical writings are precise pyramidal constructions which are carefully safe-guarded. Who can publish where and at what time and, moreover, who is positioned to provide the first line of interpretation, are extremely important dicisions within the capitalist system. Huge symposia, seminars and panels are organized to support world exhibitions and global cultural projects, circulating the same theoretical personalities and public opinion makers who continually reproduce the capitalist system in theoretical terms. It is perfectly clear that in the field of global contemporary art and culture, we are not dealing with gestures of just exchange and production. We are instead dealing with the delineation of political lines within a certain (public) space, with a codification of this space and a naming of its political subjects. The question is whether, in addition to this process of codification, we also have spaces of resistance?

Carl Einstein. A Defense of the RealVienna, Schlebrügge.Editor, 2007Buying source

Einstein is emerging ever more clearly as one of the most representative and complex figures in the commitments of European artists and intellectuals between the First World War, revolution, avant-garde art, the Spanish Civil War and National Socialism. With his books "Negro Sculpture" (1915) and "African Sculpture" (1921) he opened up the view of the "reality" and "intensity" of this art. He co-edited various journals (incl. Die Pleite), collaborated with G. Grosz and J. Heartfield, wrote a very successful "Art of the 20th Century" and a first monograph on Georges Braque. In Paris he published, with G. Bataille, "Documents" (1929). In an intellectual biography in which an epoch is portrayed, the American philosopher David Quigley maps out the Einstein's various stages and positions in the territory of the political, philosophical and aesthetic arguments for a "new" art and a "new" society.

In reading all the theoretical contributions to this book, an essentially common idea of the social can be observed which is of fundamental importance for a new definition of artistic production: a process-related order of institutionalized actions, including the linguistic actions to which individuals are exposed. For here, in the repetition of such institutionalized acts, is where subjects first emerge at all. Objects, whether they be objects of everyday use or whole architectures, are like moulds which provide for the institutionalization of actions. The artist emerges as a social figure, as the product of a society and the agent of political interests. From this point of view, the status of objects, the status of the "work" is not the expression of a circumscribed meaning, but the instrument of forming a subject. The opposition of theory and practice becomes obsolete. Subject and object are meaning written into actions.